Don’t jump the gun in Keri Racing

Keri Racing, from Neowiz Internet (the same company that brought us London 2012, the official iOS game of the Olympics), takes on the hottest social network game hits by combining multiple genres in one fun new universe. Whether you’re a solo player or prefer to help friends and compete with them, Keri Racing has you covered.

Named for the cute cartoon birds that serve as mounts for racing against both the AI and friends in real-time, Keri Racing combines farming, being a business mogul, pet raising, RPG-esque stats building, and action-packed interactive racing to provide a unique social and racing experience. But the main goal here is to dominate the racing circuit by raising and racing your pet keris…

The menu-based controls for the sim-oriented portions of the game are fast and easy to navigate. Farming, business building, and pet raising are smoothly integrated in an elegant, creative interface. The game’s action portion, racing the adorable keris, offers easy to learn controls and plenty of different environments, tracks, and modes of play to keep gamers coming back for more.



LG begins mass-producing thinner displays ahead of new iPhone launch

We’ve heard several reports over the past few months that Apple is using a new, thinner display in its next iPhone. The tech is called in-cell, and will help slim down the handset.

Interestingly enough, LG Display’s CEO Han Sang-beom announced today that his company has just started mass-producing a new line of thinner, smartphone display panels…

Reuters reports on the CEO’s comments this evening, and it’s clear it believes that LG’s new display panels are going to be used in Apple’s next-generation iPhone.

“Sources have told Reuters that the panels for the new iPhone will be 4 inches corner to corner — 30 percent bigger than current iPhones.

The iPhone screens will also be thinner than previous versions with the use of so-called in-cell panels. The new technology embeds touch sensors into the liquid crystal display, eliminating the touch-screen layer found in current iPhones.”

It’s worth noting that LG is a panel supplier for Apple, and the company was tapped as a next-gen iPhone display-maker by The Wall Street Journal back in May. So it’s possible that Reuters is spot-on, further confirming reports that the next iPhone will have a thinner, larger screen.

As far as the specs of the displays, they’re said to have a resolution of 1136 x 640 and a PPI (pixels per inch) of 326. Essentially they’ll have the same width and PPI as the iPhone 4S.

Apple is expected to unveil the new iPhone at a media event on September 12. Pre-orders are said to start the same day, with the handset arriving in retail stores the following week.



AT&T’s FaceTime limits could violate F.C.C. rules

AT&T sent shockwaves through the tech community last week when it announced its future plans for iOS 6′s new FaceTime over Cellular feature. The good news is that it won’t be charging separately for the service, but the bad news is only customers on its new Mobile Share data plans will be able to use it.

As you can imagine, this has folks upset — particularly AT&T customers who are still on unlimited, or other legacy, data plans. Why should they have to switch to a [likely] more expensive data plan to use the feature? Well, according to Public Knowledge’s senior lawyer John Bergmayer, they shouldn’t have to…

The New York Times reports:

“Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that focuses on Internet law, says that by prohibiting its other customers from using the video-calling feature on the network, AT&T is violating net-neutrality rules by blocking a service that potentially competes with its own.

John Bergmayer, senior staff lawyer at Public Knowledge, said AT&T was violating the F.C.C.’s Open Internet Rules, which say that mobile providers shall not “block applications that compete with the provider’s voice or video telephony services.”

AT&T, of course, is maintaining that it has done nothing wrong. Here’s a statement from Mark Siegel, a spokesman for the carrier:

“FaceTime is available to all of our customers today over Wi-Fi, and now we’re expanding its availability even further as an added benefit of our new Mobile Share data plans.”

The F.C.C. (Federal Communications Commission) has thus far not commented on the situation, but don’t count it out. The agency has been known to get involved with carrier affairs — most recently, telling Verizon it could no longer block third-party tethering applications and fining it $1.25 million.

It’ll be interesting to see how this unfolds, both from a legal and customer turnover standpoint. Apple is launching a new smartphone next month, and AT&T is already expected to lose a number of customers in favor of Verizon’s much larger LTE network. And this can’t possibly be helping its cause.

What do you think, should the F.C.C. get involved here?



Final settlement talks fail between Apple and Samsung CEOs

With the witness testimony stage over with, and the trial set to be handed over to the jury this week, Judge Lucy Koh pleaded with CEOs from both companies to meet one last time today to try and resolve their differences.

Well according to Samsung attorney Kevin Johnson, the two CEOs did speak today. But, as you might have guessed, the last-minute settlement talks failed. It looks like the high-stakes trial is going to be left up to the jury…

The Verge reports:

“We’d heard rumors that the CEOs of Apple and Samsung were getting together today for one last court-mandated meeting, but their discussion proved unfruitful. Samsung attorney Kevin Johnson just told Judge Lucy Koh that “The CEOs did speak…There was no resolution.”

The meeting was a last ditch effort to bring the legal battle between the two companies to a halt before closing arguments start tomorrow. Because after that, the verdict and fate of these two tech giants will be put in the juries hands.

Judge Koh has stated on several occasions that the stakes were too high in this trial to leave it up to a group of citizens. And that’s why she has continued to urge both companies to try and resolve their differences outside of court.

That being said, the schedule for the remainder of the trial is as follows: closing arguments are set for tomorrow, and jury deliberations are expected to begin Wednesday. And then, it shouldn’t be too long before we hear a verdict.

How would you vote? Is Samsung guilty or not guilty of copying Apple?



Photos of complete next-gen iPhone front panel surface

The amount of claimed leaked next-generation iPhone parts we’re seeing is starting to get out of control. Yesterday we saw a purported dock connector for the handset, and now this.

The above photo is of what’s believed to be a complete front panel belonging to Apple’s next smartphone. It has the rumored elongated display, and a repositioned FaceTime camera…

MacRumors has the pics, which were uploaded by nationwide repair shop UBreakiFix. The firm says that it received the photos from one of their distributers and they appear legitimate.

The display in the next iPhone is said to measure 4-inches in diagonal, up from 3.5-inches, with a resolution of 1136 x 640. This theory has been corroborated by a number of news outlets, as well as a recent discovery that Apple’s upcoming software scales to fit such a display.

At this point, it’s hard to imagine that the designs seen in previous part leaks are anything but accurate. They’re Apple-like, they’re consistent, and there’s obviously a lot of them floating around.

Of course, Apple could still pull a 180 and surprise everyone at its iPhone event next month. But we’re not counting on it.



Apple kinda responds to the SMS security flaw found in iOS

Yesterday we broke the news that our friend and iOS hacker pod2g had uncovered a major security flaw in the way the iPhone handles SMS. The exploit basically allows anyone to specify a different “reply-to” phone number when sending you a text message. You can easily imagine various scenarios of how this could be used maliciously.

Today, Apple sent a statement that doesn’t necessarily makes us feel better about the exploit found, but which does insist on the fact that iMessage is more secure than standard text messages…

In a statement sent to Engadget, Apple explains:

Apple takes security very seriously. When using iMessage instead of SMS, addresses are verified which protects against these kinds of spoofing attacks. One of the limitations of SMS is that it allows messages to be sent with spoofed addresses to any phone, so we urge customers to be extremely careful if they’re directed to an unknown website or address over SMS.

Apple is basically telling us two things here:

iMessage is safer than SMS
They are not going to do anything about this SMS exploit
Move along, sir. If you expected Apple to take care of this safety concern for you, you’re going to have to rethink your expectations. To be fair though – and noting that I am no SMS expert – it is my understanding that SMS is an international standard that is mostly a carrier responsibility, and I don’t think Apple can do anything about this issue. But again, I’m no SMS/security expert and I might be wrong.

Lesson learned. Do not trust any suspicious text message! But didn’t we already know that?